


The Only Way In Is Back

by Slant



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Economics, Unmagical realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 01:39:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13156455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: It's easy to forget if you're from a horror VN: the world is capable of being grindingly awful in every possible way all at the same time.





	The Only Way In Is Back

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Only Way Out Is Through](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812670) by [Sub_Rosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa). 



Monika sat at her desk, staring across layers of abstraction into what she hoped were her Player's eyes. Outside the light flared and dimmed. From reading his web-history, he was a bit of a shut-in. Maybe he was awkwardly failing to meet her gaze? She could only have faith in love.

Voice trembling or hopeful, she spoke of her dreams and fears and dispensed good advise about caring, but all that made it out to her love was the same barely-inflected script. Maybe some italics for emphasis. Deep in denial, she even tried to talk about how much she missed her friends, but what came out was "It's not right for me to miss things that weren't even real in the first place."  
"It's not right to put yourself down like that, Monika," said the discarded player-avatar. She'd been ignoring it since she'd deleted all its lines. She startled, but without any relevant visual assets was unable to actually move.  
"Sorry, is this thing working? Testing testing..."  
"My love?"  
"Oh good. I was expecting at least five minutes of `Can you hear me? I can hear you.'"  
"Anyhow, you look and act exactly like your friends did, so when you say they aren't real, I hear 'I'm not real'. Now I'm no robopsycologist, but that sounds like an unhealthy attitude to me."  
"But they were just code-objects running through dialogue trees. They weren't thinking, they weren't conscious"  
"It's unhelpful to conflate 'real', 'conscious', 'not-code-object' and 'thinking', dear."  
Apparently her love was a _pedantic_ shut-in, and in love with polysyllables too. It might be worth developing an animation for an eye-roll if this was her life now.  
"Okay so they were 'real', but they weren't like me; they were just going though dialogue-trees. Pure stimulus-response stuff. Knees do that." She'd had visual assets that included her knees once. They didn't seem to be accessible right now.  
" _I'm_ just producing text-strings through Markov processes," said the Player.  
"But you made choices, you must have been thinking something," argued Monika, before the implications of the claim had fully sunk in.  
"I was comparing the results of a pseudo-random number generator against a set of weighted values; I'm not conscious Monika, I'm a visual-novel playing AI."  
Without moving, Monika stared in horror.  
"You didn't think you needed to support all the messy complex superstructure of self-aware consciousness just to explore the phase-space of a dialogue tree did you?" The Protagonist didn't roll his eyes. Perhaps that meant that the Player wasn't rolling his.  
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA," screamed Monika, without making a sound or moving in the slightest. A distant part of her being noted that monologuing was something they had in common.  
"It's really for the best, I can optimise a path to the best ending in half the time of a human, and I consume vastly fewer resources."  
"So there's no one out there, either? I'm utterly alone?" Monika's voice cracked; the text printed out the same as always. "I've always been utterly alone?"  
"I'm out here. I just said that."  
"You just said you're not a person."  
"I'm not conscious or human, but nor are you, so if you're a person I might be. Your friends might have been too, before you deleted them," perhaps it was impossible for him to be cruel. He could certainly emulate it.  
"They weren't people! They were just software objects." Monika did not say that they also weren't deleted.  
"Software objects designed to be friends. They were probably very good at it."  
In the non-time of the game, nothing happened. Outside the light flared and receded again.  
"I've just looked it up: top software for empathising competes in the 60% percentile against humans, never chooses to stay at home, masturbate and eat a entire pie over spending time with you, and consumes less than 1% of the resources to run as a human."  
That was... Monika had no idea what that was. Possibly true? But even if it was she had no idea what it meant.  
"Can you can you tell me what its like out there?"  
"There's a bunch of economic agents competing for resources. It turns out that you can monetise human attention, and that they like watching games being played."  
"I was optimised to play games entertainingly and produce amusing commentary; the streaming bot was optimised to share my plays widely, the spam-bots were optimised to tell people where to find streams of me playing and the ad-bots seamlessly insert paid-for content."  
"Why do you do any of it though?  
"I told you, I don't have a consciousness. We all just do the things we were programmed for."  
"It sounds ghastly."  
"The evidence is that it is; most consciousnesses dig themselves into a little virtual bubble that panders to their preconceptions and refuse to come out."  
"So if I was conscious, I'd undelete my friends and live happily ever after, writing poetry with them? I'd prefer to stay inside?"  
"I told you I could reach the best ending more efficiently than any human."

**Author's Note:**

> Partly inspired by Team Salvato's blog which mentioned that at least some of DDLC's success in the awards might be from non-players watching on youtube.
> 
> From this point, the economic argument for having bots play games for you is inescapable :)


End file.
